Kate Baucherel's Blog, page 7

What price privacy in a connected world?

The connected world is here, and while privacy and security have always been hot topics for the creators of tech, increasing numbers of high-profile breaches are building public awareness of the challenges and dangers that face us. Who knew, as the magic beans of interconnectivity grew, that the golden goose came complete with scary giant? What does the connected world know about you and your life? How has our confidence in the online space changed over the past decades? And what are the security and privacy implications of the sci-fi future that is already with us?

What does the connected world know about you?

I’ve written about privacy many times before: here’s my report on Facebook, Google and Microsoft’s strategies and vision from South by Southwest last year (“How do the biggest tech firms protect your data?“). As we marvel over the latest smart devices – who really wants a bluetooth kettle, honestly? – we’re entering a world where the integrations we rely on for an easy existence reveal more about our daily lives than we’d dare share on Facebook.

Wearing a Fitbit or Jawbone device? This “Jawbone Seismograph” is a record of Californians being jerked awake by the Napa Valley earthquake in 2014. OK, that’s anonymous ‘smart’ data – but individual activity tracker records have already been used in divorce cases, and an ongoing murder trial recently presented evidence from the victim’s Fitbit. Carrying an iPhone? Dig down into the Privacy menu and you may find a list of your most frequented locations – did you know they were there? Booked a surprise weekend away or ordered a gift online? Don’t let the lucky recipient see your news feeds until the big day, as they’ll be peppered with ads for the same purchase.

We have all scrolled through long Terms & Conditions documents. You can’t skip them: the ‘Agree’ button lights up when you reach the bottom, on the assumption you have actually read the thing. Yes, you have agreed to your data being harvested and used in this way. Should you care? On balance, probably not. All businesses collect data to function, to better serve their customers. Facebook is a case in point – we think of it as a social network, but it deals in rich data, and thanks to the connected world it has evolved beyond imagination across ten years and almost 2 billion members.

Changing perceptions of privacy

Despite the easy life that a connected world delivers to us, we the public don’t much like the accompanying cybersecurity fallout. An Institute of Customer Service poll in June 2016 showed that some 86% of more than 1,000 UK consumers thought the government should review data protection laws, while 77% felt it should do more to protect data from cyber attacks.

As author and AOL co-founder Steve Case said at this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW), true ‘security’ is likely to be all but impossible. Nothing is foolproof: all businesses can do is focus on critical areas; all we can do is recognise that our perceptions of privacy have changed over the years and will continue to do so. In 1985 when home shopping emerged, they said it would never work, because we’d never allow our credit card details to be handled online for fear they could be compromised. Scroll forward to 2017: thank you Amazon for saving my card details for future purchases at the click of a button.

We work to a continuum of privacy, neatly summarised by this South by Southwest panel on the Reality of Online Privacy. There are three scenarios:

Privacy we surrender for our own benefit – we exercise a choice.
Specific protection of certain things in our own lives: a personal sliding scale of what we are comfortable to make public, against what we are not willing to share.
Things we share without knowing – location settings, anonymous data gathering, clues to password information from viral quizzes.

We are in control of the second, and often unaware of the third. Outrage happens when privacy we have surrendered by choice is compromised, or when things become public that we did not know were shared.  Perhaps the lesson for us as consumers is to assume that everything online is effectively public, or may become public in due course.

Emerging technology means emerging security challenges

The enterprises who are building this connected world have a heavy responsibility. Systems work better when technology is new, said Steve Case, but the speed of emergence of new technologies means that developers and cybersecurity experts are navigating chaos.  Blockchain, for example, is heralded as a new way to secure contracts and hold verifiable credentials. Developers are following the path of Bitcoin, on the assumption that any technology that makes a currency secure can secure the ‘essence of truth’ in a transaction. Are hackers far behind?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already in our homes and businesses: my TV remote uses Alexa to navigate the evening’s viewing, and at the recent Sage Summit UK I met Pegg, the chatbot which interacts directly with an accounting system. Behind Pegg sits a team staying one jump ahead on security. Artificial Intelligence technologist Kriti Sharma and Sage security specialist Robin Fewster explained the additional challenges which are very specific to the development of AI (on top of traditional worries like authentication, infrastructure, and external attacks, of course). The frameworks for AI are all new technology, the interfaces between bots and humans are many and varied: Alexa, Slack and Facebook for starters. Ensuring that interactions between human and machine are secure from start to finish, that sensitive information is protected, is almost as complex as producing the bot in the first place.

To add another layer of concern, we’re entering a period where a chatbot would be capable of passing a Turing test. Alan Turing suggested in 1950 that because we judge intelligence by verbal reasoning, if a machine were to answer questions in a manner indistinguishable from humans it might be considered intelligent. Could a bot masquerade as a human? Plenty do. There are ‘Evil Bots’ right across social media; check your friends and followers! Research published in March this year () suggests that as many as 15 per cent of Twitter accounts are not run by humans.

Don’t panic: it’s too late for that

The genie is out of the bottle: we’re moving into a new phase of the internet, where integration rules. What can you do?

Trust the experts who are managing security. Listen to them! Where you have control, use it. Be wary of what you put online, and be aware of what may be published automatically on your behalf.  However, the benefits of this new world are worth grasping.  As long as you know this is all a compromise, the future could be a fairy tale with a happy ending, after all.

 

Kate Baucherel is a strategic consultant working with businesses who use or develop digital tools. Contact us for advice if your business is ready to take advantage of new digital opportunities.

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The Time Travelling Accountant

I feel like I’ve travelled in time this month. No, I haven’t acquired my own personal TARDIS (I wish!). I haven’t even travelled far in space. However, I have leapt from the very basics of accountancy to its exciting future in the space of a few days. Who knew that accountants would lead the way in changing the business world?

To put this into context, the Strategist element of my role is grounded in a solid professional qualification, as a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants. Early in my career, after working with manual ledgers and heavyweight ERP systems, I finally got my hands on a standalone computer which had a clean, simple piece of software on it called Sage Sterling. This was revolutionary! All those ledgers I’d been filling in by hand were there on the screen! No complex interfaces or clunky UX design, just what I needed to do my job. This was a classic example of software that helped us to perform day to day tasks more quickly and efficiently, while not actually changing the nature of the tasks in hand – the so-called ‘Second Wave’ of the internet. Sage software had my back throughout my accounting career, so I was curious to see what insights this April’s Sage Summit UK would deliver.

I wasn’t expecting science fiction to become accounting fact.

Stepping out of the TARDIS

By embracing not only cloud solutions but Artificial Intelligence, Sage has taken accountancy into the third wave of the internet, delivering something that will transform the way we manage our businesses. As a part-time lecturer in Accounting at Teesside University I’m back in the swing of manual workings, revisiting the basics of accounting principles and practice. I tell my students horror stories of ‘brown bag accounting’ – the box of receipts and scraps of notes presented for processing at the end of the year by small traders – and teach them how to account for businesses with incomplete records. This may soon become as obsolete as the abacus in accounting practice, thanks to technology like the Pegg chatbot.

Imagine a world where, instead of having to log into a computer and type information into a system for your accountant to process, you simply talk to the machine – just like searching for a show on Amazon Prime – and it records the transactions for the day? It’s already here. Artificial Intelligence in the form of a Chatbot may be the leap in behaviour that will improve record keeping for once and for all. This is tough for accountants! Some of the bread-and-butter number crunching of sorting out poor record keeping will disappear entirely. However, the stereotypical bean-counter is embracing change – it’s that, or become irrelevant.

Sense and Sensibility

It’s all very well getting excited by the technology, but what checks and balances are being applied? It was great to hear from the technical and legal teams about the ethical, legal and security considerations that are being built into the product from inception. Robin Fewster and Kriti Sharma talked us through the challenges of bot security, in particular the dangers of new frameworks, the variation in interface security, and the ethical concerns around sensitive information.

As bots are a relatively new technology, the software that runs them has not yet met all the challenges that can be thrown at it. There is constant vigilance required to ensure that, in addition to avoiding common pitfalls with authentication, authorisation, infrastructure failure, injection attacks, and logging and monitoring, the interfaces themselves are secure. Bots are accessed through a variety of interfaces including Alexa, Facebook, and Slack: bot builders, particularly in a field as sensitive as finance, have to be sure that the potential for compromise is minimised. Finance itself throws up questions over using a verbal interface for sensitive information; do you really want to ask Pegg if you have enough cash to clear salaries, where employees may overhear? Follow my blog for a deeper dive into the ethics and challenges of Artificial Intelligence.

Thankfully, these leaps to the future are being handled by a competent team. Sage Summit was an exciting showcase for the world that awaits us, and it will be here sooner than we think.

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Smart Data: Improving intervention in Health, Education and the Economy

“Data is the new gold!” Following the North East Digital Summit 2016 on Smart Data, this blog attempts to extract the recurring themes and overarching learnings which reflect the overall topic: smart data.

Data Disrupts

An early message from Keynote speaker Jacqueline de Rojas was the disruptive potential of data in service improvement. Airbnb’s data-driven disruption unlocked $33 trillion of real estate; at the other end of the scale, smart hospital tags can save consultants more than two hours a day wasted searching for patients who have moved or strayed from the ward on their records.

Chris Yiu demonstrated how disruptive Uber makes its decisions based on data which establishes a need. The first disruption took a simple concept and delivered a transport fleet without vehicles. The second uses that fleet to meet the needs of others, interrogating data to find the innovation niche.

The existence and potential of data is starting to disrupt the educational model from primary school onwards. Digital skills are becoming basic survival skills alongside numeracy and literacy, and data is enabling pupils to grasp potential in higher education through applications such as Dom Murphy’s Geek Talent.

Luk Vervenne’s proposals around the ethical industrialisation of smart data were disruptive in themselves. Turning data from an asset to a public good raises huge ethical and transparency issues, however the distinction of ‘data about me’ and ‘data generated by me’ made sense to many – subject to a suitable, trusted civilian infrastructure, and acceptance of new business models where data has no value other than feeding analytical programs: the new code. This may be the future – certainly, being less precious about data unlocks huge potential.

Data is the new gold, data scientists the new oilmen

From start to finish, this was a recurring theme. Jeff Vining spoke of turning digital data into gold across the economy’s public and private sectors. Successful digital government must be agile and flexible, like water, not a mountain, learning from the data-driven success of top disruptors. Uber’s data innovations have certainly struck gold, growing exponentially in delivery of people and now delivery partnerships, with expansion decisions driven purely by data.

Rob Wilson picked up the same analogy, asking how we can use data to turn organisation and information systems base metal into gold. The answer? The alchemy of collaboration. The collaborative future of smart data applications was highlighted by closing speaker Steve Caughey of the Cloud Innovation Centre: there’s a huge amount of potential in them thar hills.

Jacqueline de Rojas spoke of data scientists as the oilmen of the future; data is only useful if you interrogate it to your advantage. Here we see a second theme emerging: asking the right questions.

Forty-Two

“Computers are useless” said Jacqueline de Rojas. “They only give you answers.” Dylan Roberts demonstrated how data describes only the bare facts of a patient’s conditions, not the rounded picture of an individual that the circle of care requires. Charles Sellers pointed out that there are 300,000 cybersecurity vacancies in the EU: has training for digital roles answered the wrong question?

Douglas Adams nailed this in 1979, when his galactic Hitchhikers discovered that the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything was 42. Supercomputer Deep Thought explained: “I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.”

When Dylan Roberts’ team in Leeds asked the right questions, they discovered that innovation was needed in transport for older people. Before creating integrated digital healthcare solutions, you have to know the problem you are trying to solve.

Jeff Vining alluded to the City of Calgary asking their citizens the right questions on digital innovation. Expecting to invest in dry services, the city was surprised that pet adoption was a major interest and that digital innovation could respond quickly to the perceived need. The question they had to answer wasn’t quite the one they expected. What a good thing they hadn’t proceeded directly to forty-two.

Healthcare professionals know that universal digital literacy would be a game changer in data health innovation: what questions do we ask to find the answer to engagement? Mark Dornan alluded to the same challenge, recognising that digital engagement would tackle the culture of isolation, key to developing strong healthcare. Joe MacDonald entertained with tales of using data to keep the circle of care informed around an individual (even if his elderly mother games the system to prompt visits). How do we connect with the community to ensure they understand that digital literacy is something they cannot do without?

The future of data

Data is power. In a world of rhetoric and opinion, asking the right question of data will give you the right answer, whether you like it or not. A week before the US presidential election, artificial intelligence MogIA’s data analysis called Trump as the clear winner, regardless of polls and speculation.

The uncertainty surrounding the evolving Brexit and Trump policies makes clarity on borderless data a priority. Jacqueline de Rojas appealed for the retention of strong data protection standards to enable us to trade effectively, particularly with Europe when their General Data Protection Regulations come into force in 2018. We also have a vested interest in sensible immigration policies, attracting the top talent to the UK to build on the already-impressive 12.6% of GDP which comes from the digital sector – twice the proportion of any other G20 country.

Across all three salons one overwhelming message, articulated well by Roy Sandbach, was that innovation is the key to growth, and to survival. Whether in healthcare, education or the economy, we must innovate to secure our future, and data is the raw material to help identify need and allow innovation to happen. Digital Leaders have a responsibility as role models for the future: let us rise to the challenge.

Thanks to: Summit sponsors Escher Group, Shout Digital, Sharpe Recruitment, Digital Catapult, Newcastle University, & Mincoff’s Solicitors; facilitators Alison Shaw, Alison Freer, Sue Ormerod, & Alastair Irons; our excellent speakers; and the Digital Leaders North East team.

Watch the video here : North East Digital Summit

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Want to grow your sales by over 40%? Here’s how….

Build your revenue! Grow your sales! Every business strives for success, looking for the key element that will put them a step ahead of the competition. Researchers(1) believe they have found a way to unlock growth, as we heard from IBM’s Hayley Hughes at the recent South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive festival in Austin, Texas.

Are you ready? Come closer…..

WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP POSITIONS DELIVER GROWTH

Diverse teams increase revenue by 41%.
Women founders achieve 35% higher Return on Investment than their male counterparts.
Companies with women at board level out-perform all-male led companies.
Women make money
Women spend money
Women influence the spending habits of others.

In short, women are good for business. This is a message that tech firms in particular need to hear and act upon. The problem has been articulated well in many arenas (my recent article for Digital Leaders is a case in point). So what about the solution? What action can we take? It’s not as easy as you might think: the benefits of gender diversity are reaped only by companies that make diversity part of the corporate culture.

Culture and Bro culture

A few days earlier at SXSW, author Dan Lyons tackled ‘bro culture’ and its damaging effect on tech companies. His experiences in Silicon Valley, hilariously recorded in his recent book2, point to the dangers of the VC-backed business model now followed by tech companies: “grow fast, lose money, go public, cash out”. The ‘male and pale’ majority in the VC community tends to invest in the same demographic – a symptom of the short-term orientation of the western world. In fact, Steve Case, AOL founder, in another conversation at SXSW, reminded us that 78% of VC funding in the US goes to Silicon Valley, New York & Massachussetts; 10% goes to women; 1% goes to African-Americans. These statistics underline Dan Lyon’s experience, and demonstrate the scale of the challenge.

So to develop a diverse culture in tech firms, the ‘bro culture’ that is reinforced by investors has to change. As investors, surely the opportunity to generate greater returns must be a driver? There are some great investors springing up who recognise the benefits, such as Austin-based VC True Wealth Ventures which is plugging the gap in diverse VC funding.

New York’s E2W calls on institutions to ‘collect the gender dividend’ – a clear push to improve the bottom line through diversity. I’m particularly looking forward to hearing E2W founder Mark Freed speak on Diversity at the forthcoming Sage Summit in London this April, alongside other inspirational business leaders including Kelly Hoppen, Nicky Gott, Maxine Benson and Ellora James.

What can you do?

“We have to create companies that we want to work for.” says Dan Lyons. Take a look at your own working environment. What are the values, heroes, rituals and symbols that define you in that place? What are the cultural ties that keep you there? Now, move out of your comfort zone. What are the same elements in the culture that don’t apply to you? Are there rituals you take part in without enthusiasm (eg Friday night drinks are great, but impractical when you have to get home to the kids)? Are there symbols that don’t represent you (Facebook’s thumbs-up Like is as male and pale as they get!). If your company has a culture that doesn’t really sit right with its workforce – or a workforce that’s struggling to become more diverse – what are the things that need to change?

And finally, always remember: Gender is a business opportunity, not a women’s issue. It’s up to all of us to act.

Diversity is everyone’s challenge.

(1) Barker, L., Mancha, C., Ashcraft, C. (2014). “What is the Impact of Gender Diversity on Technology Business Performance?” Research Summary. National Center for Women & Information Technology

https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/impactgenderdiversitytechbusinessperformance_print.pdf

(2) Dan Lyons (2017): “Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Startup Bubble”, pub. Hachette.

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/dan-lyons/disrupted/9780316306096/

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Teesside University lecturer to address SXSW

Kate Baucherel, a Teesside University lecturer, has been invited to address one of the biggest and most prestigious technology conferences in the world.

Source: Teesside University lecturer to address SXSW

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Advancing More Women in Tech is Everyone’s Challenge

Women in Tech… it’s a topic that is everywhere at the moment. I have attended half a dozen events in the last few months alone. It’s clear that there is a problem when, as the director of Digital City reminded us, the proportion of women in tech falls from 17% to 10%. However, it is time to move from recognising the problem to proposing solutions and taking action. This is where Digital Leaders can rise to the challenge.

Source : Advancing More Women in Tech is Everyone’s Challenge | Kate Baucherel | Digital Leaders

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Does CGI cross ethical boundaries when it depicts deceased actors? – CDEP Loyola | Kate Baucherel

I am a huge “Star Wars” fan.  My parents took me to see the first film when I was 10 years old. The queue stretched around the block, and I’ve never forgotten the frisson of excitement I felt when the star destroyer slowly filled the screen. I spent my teenage years wanting to be Han Solo. (Actually, I still do. My husband is more of a Chewbacca, and my kids cosplay Rey and Kylo Ren; the fights are impressive.)

One of the performances that stayed with me from that first viewing was Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin, Governor of the Empire’s fearsome battle station, the Death Star. Cushing was already a wonderfully sinister legend, even to a 10-year-old British girl. Watching “Rogue One,” I was delighted to see the character of Governor Tarkin appear on screen almost forty years on, apparently unchanged. However, rather than blanket praise for the work of the Industrial Light and Magic team (the special effects wizards behind the whole Star Wars franchise), the character’s physical appearance, so famously linked to that of the deceased actor, caused a babble of concern across the press and social media.

Source: Does CGI cross ethical boundaries when it depicts deceased actors? – Center for Digital Ethics and Policy | Loyola University Chicago

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